Well that's sort of my point... me a large amount of coins stored in a low-transaction account would to me be characteristic of reserve-type funds stored by big

Well that's sort of my point... me a large amount of coins stored in a low-transaction account would to me be characteristic of reserve-type funds stored by big exchanges. In fact, many parties like Coinbase have come out and openly stated that only a small percentage of their users' coins move around, and therefore the vast majority can, and is, stored in 'air gapped cold storage'. i.e. on private keys that never touched a network of any kind. This could result in a few cold storage addresses which carry funds for orders of magnitude more users, rather than a few individuals. In fact, if you follow your own link you'll find many of the addresses are in fact identified as belonging to exchanges like Kraken or Bitfinex cold wallets. e.g. the second richest address is a $1.9 billion Bitfinex wallet. So I don't think the title of the research '1000 people own 40%' is hard to dismiss at all. It could well be true, but a mere list of addresses isn't proof to that claim.